1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of navigation devices and more particularly to annotation of street grammars in speech enabled navigation devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Over the years, various navigation devices have been developed. More recently, speech recognition technology in vehicle navigation systems have been developed to eliminate the time-consuming task of keying in street or city names by allowing users to simply speak a destination. Some navigation devices receive voice input of destination elements in a particular order such as state, city, street name along with the street suffix name (avenue, terrace, place etc.). In the case of such navigation devices, the user is required to say the street suffix name in conjunction with the street name ‘root’ in order to be navigated to the desired destination.
A common issue however in speech enabled navigation devices is when users often leave out the street suffix names. The drawback in current navigation devices is that usually the system expects the user to state the suffix for a given street name. However, it is often found that users don't really know which suffixes are even possible for a given street but their memories could be ideally triggered with just a short list of valid suffixes if it were possible to present a set of possible valid suffixes to the user.
Another drawback is that the user is prompted to repeat both the street name and the street suffix name together to confirm a desired destination. There is no way for the user to say a street name alone, and then have the navigation device ask for only a suffix name that can be annotated to the street name, eliminating the need to have the user repeat the street name again along with a suffix name. Thus, an annotated street grammar to include possible street name suffixes annotated to a given street is desired.